Dave Wells is an advisory consultant, educator, and industry analyst dedicated to building meaningful connections throughout the path from data to business value. More than forty years of information systems experience combined with over ten years of business management give him a unique perspective about the connections among business, information, data, and technology.

The once simple world of data preparation—ETL for operational data integration—changed radically with the emergence of self-service data analysis and visualization tools. Every line-of-business data analyst needs the ability to prepare data before analysis. The exciting work of analytics doesn’t work well until the data is ready for meaningful analysis.

The common practice of using spreadsheets to improve, enrich, blend, and format data is inefficient, time consuming, and error prone. Modern data preparation technologies meet the challenges with business-friendly and code-free tools. When your analytics projects spend more time finding and fixing data than analyzing the data, you really need to make a change. Learn about the tools and techniques that can help individuals and teams—both business and technical—to cleanse, combine, format, and sample data for analytics.

You Will Learn:

•The common challenges of data preparation in the age of big data

•Techniques for data preparation that improve both speed and quality of analytics activities